Page 27 of The Start of the Story
‘I’ll just get dressed. Why do you want to see the manor anyway?’ I picked up my toast and my tea and prepared to head up the stairs.
‘I was thinking – what if the manor was built on the site of Roman remains? It’s the way people go – a good spot is a good spot and people have a tendency to build where there’s stone and a good flat site that’s sheltered from the wind. It would be within the boundaries of my possible location, so it might be worth checking out in case there’s any indications. Clues.’
I scampered up the stairs, dressing gown swinging and trying not to spill my tea, mentally rearranging my day in my head. A quick walk on the moors would be good for me anyhow, to get the remnants of that dream blown away, and then I could come back and get to work without this lingering feeling of resentment. And I hadn’t lied, I really could do with a little bit of local feeling in my writing – I’d got so wrapped up in the legends that I hadn’t really put much colour in; all those bits that people liked to read about when they got home from their holiday, reminders of the moors they’d walked or even admired from a distance. A pouring-wet day with a force eight gale probably wasn’t the reminder that they’d want, but I could edit it down to a smell of peat, the gurgle of streams and the occasional grouse clucking its way into the air.
I came back down the stairs to find Connor lounging around near the front door. ‘Wow. I thoughtIwas dressed for it,’ he observed as I rustled my way into the hall.
‘You’re wearing tourists’ clothes,’ I said, adjusting my oilskins. ‘If you want to do any real work up there on the moor through winter, you needproperwaterproofs.’
‘I’m going to check on a potential site not… not… gut herring on a trawler.’ He opened the front door and wind drove a particularly intrusive squall in to examine my furniture.
I raised my eyebrows at him and gave him a ‘you’ll find out’ smile. The rain up here wasn’t a soft, view-obscuring drizzle. On the high moors it came at you from every direction simultaneously and, at this time of year, it had ice on its edges too. Connor was wearing good walking gear, waterproof trousers and a half-decent coat, but I knew the way the rain got in through seams and waistbands. Our rain was the mosquito of precipitation, it got everywhere, even when you thought you’d protected yourself against it.
We splashed to the car, Connor rustling lightly whilst I walked like a reanimated corpse, as the oilskins meant bending my arms and legs was difficult, and climbed in. Visibility was almost nil in the driving rain.
‘Are you sure you want to go up there today?’ I asked, starting the engine and staring out through the windscreen wipers’ frantic attempts.
‘Ah, it’ll be grand. I’m only here for six months, two of which are nearly gone. I can’t imagine the weather is going to improve mightily in the next few weeks, so might as well do it now.’
He smiled again, and I felt a little jolt. Of course. He was only here for six months, presumably until the memory of his transgressions in Dublin had faded safely into the past. By the spring, and the slow, gradual improvement in the weather, he’d be gone.
‘Oh, yes. And we ought to get up there before the ford gets too full to drive through and we have to go the long way round. Right.’ I let the clutch out and the car slithered onto the more solid surface of the ford edge, crept through the building water, and began the climb up onto the moor, throwing gobbets of sandy mud around us as we went.
‘They’re forecasting it getting colder. Does it snow often out here?’ Connor asked idly.
‘Most winters we get some. We’re pretty high up, so it dumps on us in preference to the towns lower down.’
‘Do you get snowed in?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Cosy.’ Connor went back to staring out at the bleak grey expanse. The low cloud meant that the rain had less distance to travel so was even heavier up here and the view was cut to what was immediately in front. ‘Cosy’ was not the word that sprang to mind when I considered being stuck in the house with a questionable electricity supply and no idea when a passingfarmer with a plough on the front of a tractor would get around to clearing the road to the cottage.
‘Don’t you get snow in Dublin?’ I asked as I pulled the car onto the edge of the track so that we could walk out to the manor site.
‘Ah, it’s like any city. It snows, now and then, but you don’t really feel it, other than that the bus comes late and the bars get busy early.’
I opened my door, and the wind took it from my hands and snatched it to its furthest extent. I’d grown up in a city. Elliot and I had met in Leeds, got jobs in York, and decided that we wanted to live – I tried very hard not to think ‘and raise our children’ – out in the countryside. Right now, with rain trying to get into the car with me, I couldn’t quite remember why.
‘Remind me again why we’re here?’ I had to half shout the words above the noise of the wind, which hit our ears like the sound of a practising piper. ‘Are you going to want to dig around the site of the old manor? Only I don’t think you’ll be able to get much of a hole before it becomes a pond.’
‘I’m a historian,’ Connor said vaguely, shrugging his back to the wind. ‘Not an archaeologist. I mean, I’ve done my time on digs when I was a student, but I mostly deal with digging in libraries and archives now. I’m the person that points the archaeologists at places.’
We tramped along a small trackway that once would have been the approach to the manor. It lay at the top of a shallow valley and away towards the bottom of the slope I could see signs of activity. A dig tent had been erected, blown down, and was being stared at by a group of people as it flapped its collapsed edges in the wind like a half-manifested ghost.
‘They’re getting started, that’s good.’ Connor shaded his eyes against the driving rain and peered out through the mist at the group. ‘They won’t get much done at this time of year but itmight be enough for them to establish what they need to do when the weather improves.’ He wriggled his shoulders. ‘About July should do it.’
I was pleased to note that all the activity was a decent distance from my stone, which was about a quarter of a mile away from us, stretching its length invisibly in the tangled and waving undergrowth.
‘This is roughly the site of the manor,’ I said, my pointing finger describing a rectangular shape. ‘Foundations were fifteenth century, but I think the site was originally established in the fourteenth. Wooden then, of course, but rebuilt in locally made brick around about 1520.’
Connor looked at me. ‘It’s all right, you don’t need to give me the lecture, now,’ he said, pulling his hood further forward over his head so that he was not much more than a nose tip and some hair. ‘I’ve got the degree.’
A hot rise of embarrassment made the inside of my waterproofs damper than the outside for a moment. ‘Yes. Sorry, of course. I was forgetting for a minute.’ My oilskins cracked in the wind like sails. ‘I was thinking of…’
Elliot. I’d been thinking of Elliot, who’d worked for a heritage building company, sourcing materials to rebuild and repair ancient houses. He’d come down more on the ‘builder’ side, where I was on the ‘historical’ side, and he’d look at stone and tell me where it was quarried and where to look for masons’ marks. I’d tell him about the people, the changing fashions, the building to ‘keep up with the de Joneses’. Actually, it was nice to have someone who already knew. It cut out a lot of the talk, which was difficult anyway because of the wind.
‘The terracing could be original Roman.’ Connor held his hood in place. The gale was not cutting his toggles any quarter.
